The Malaysian authorities denied on Thursday a widely circulated report that the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner had transmitted technical data after contact with the cockpit was lost.
The head of Malaysia Airlines said the last technical data received from Flight 370, less than half an hour after takeoff, indicated no trouble with the plane.
"That was the last transmission," Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, said at a news conference. "It did not run beyond that."
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Rolls-Royce, the maker of the aircraft's engines, had received data transmissions from those engines under a routine maintenance schedule, suggesting that the plane was aloft for several hours after contact was lost.
The plane's Trent 800 engines were manufactured at the Rolls-Royce plant at Derby, in central England, according to Richard Wray, the company's director of external communications. But the company had no immediate comment on the The Wall Street Journal report.
If confirmed, the report could mean that the plane flew more than 2,000 miles beyond the point at which it was last tracked by the civil aviation authorities.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
